Technical Field
The present invention relates to a dimension calculation method for a semiconductor device, such as a FinFET or a LED. The boundaries or edge lines between neighboring layers are extracted from an electronic image taken by Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM), Focus Ion Beam (FIB), Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM), or X-Ray Diffraction (XRD) over a semiconductor device.
Description of Related Art
In the process of semiconductor manufacturing, the performance of metrology equipment directly impacts yield. Fabs and equipment suppliers must ensure that their metrology results are within tolerances and maintain their ISO and QS quality certifications. This task becomes more challenging as the device features shrink and tolerances become tighter, to the extent of their physical limits in many cases. Especially, while the metrology tools in nanoscale regime provide ‘precise, accurate, efficient, and effective’ data; the error creeps in data collection, analysis, interpretation and presentation due to the manual or semi-auto data processing systems adopted in the present semiconductor industries. Accuracy of measurement not only depends on the metrology tools, but also directly depends on the data analysis and its interpretation. For example, nanoscale features imaged by XRD, SEM, AFM, FIB, TEM etc. and the critical dimensions are traditionally measured by manual over the images, which is not only consume a huge amount of time but also add an inaccuracy and uncertainty in the results. The results become meaningless while the inaccuracy and uncertainty become comparable to the tolerance. So the traditional manual or semi-auto data analysis or interpretation system thus cannot be reliable to estimate the nanoscale features from the data collected by the metrology tools. Therefore, an auto-metrology approach is eager in the semiconductor field to be developed for a more convincing and scientific to analyze and represent the data in a ‘precise, accurate, efficient, and effective’ way.
FIG. 1 shows a prior art
FIG. 1 shows a traditional metrology, e.g. thickness calculation, for a deposition layer of an electronic image, which comprises the following steps:
(1) Image providing;
(2) Dimension measuring; visual-manually operated;
(3) Data calculating; visual-manually operated; and
(4) Data outputting; visual-manually operated.